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Fantasy Grand Chess: Dwarven Army. Dwarven Army. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
David Paulowich wrote on Mon, May 7, 2007 01:21 AM UTC:Good ★★★★

Those 10 soldiers may be worth 15 or 16 pawns. This is not a big problem. Dwarves are slow, so slow that I am assigning a '2 pawn penalty' for the extra moves they take to develop in the opening. The 10 other pieces in the Dwarven Army have a total value about 2 pawns less their Grand Chess counterparts. One small adjustment can bring the two armies into line: substitute my War Horse for Peter Hatch's General, dropping the value another 2 pawns. Or you could leave the General unchanged and drop the 'forward ferz move' from the two War Machines. These are the best estimates that I can arrive at without playtesting.

Here is the big problem. Cannons get weaker as the other pieces are traded off. By the time 80 percent of the squares are empty, the Cannon is only half the value of a Rook. On the 10x10 board, this means a Cannon is worth a full Pawn less than a Bishop (which I assign 5/8 of a Rook's value). Even the slow moving Priest is worth about 3/5 of a Rook. Cannons need to face an opposing army with a variety of low-value pieces, that can be used to block the Cannon attacks. See Jean-Louis Cazaux's SHAKO for a successful chess variant design. NOTE: Berolina Pawns would do the job nicely, but they are not under consideration.